Charge dismissed in abortion clinic attack

PAM EASTON

Published
7:00 pm CDT, Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Associated Press Writer

Prosecutors said Wednesday a state charge likely would be refiled against a Houston man who was accused of ramming his van into a Planned Parenthood clinic after a federal charge this week was thrown out by a judge who ruled it was unconstitutional.

A state criminal mischief charge was dropped in June against Frank Lafayette Bird, 61, when federal prosecutors charged him with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for driving his vehicle into the front doors of the clinic, where abortions are performed.

Houston-based U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt dismissed the federal charge Monday, ruling Congress didn't have authority to "regulate non-economic, violent criminal conduct" when it passed the clinic law in 1994.

No one was injured March 7 when a van crashed into the front doors of the clinic near downtown Houston, but Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas, Inc. President Peter Durkin said employees and patients were shaken up and damages totaled $10,000.

"The reason we dismissed it was because the feds picked it up," Harris County prosecutor Tina Ansari said of the withdrawn state charge. "I'm pretty sure we will most likely refile."

Bird earlier was convicted of throwing a bottle into the car windshield of a physician at another Houston clinic. He received a year in federal prison and was required to pay $820.67 in restitution.

Hoyt dismissed the most recent federal indictment and declared the FACE Act unconstitutional. Bird then was released Tuesday from a federal detention center, said Arthur Fernandez of the U.S. Marshals Service.

The FACE Act bans the use of force, threats or blockades to interfere with access to reproductive health care. It was passed in response to repeated violence at abortion clinics across the nation.

"There is no campaign of violence aimed at providers across the nation by the defendant," Hoyt wrote in his ruling.

"There are no findings supporting the view that the defendant's conduct borders on interstate commerce, interferes with interstate commerce, threatens providers of interstate reproductive health services in interstate commerce, or in any way restricts the interstate movement of goods and people any more so than a person who commits a murder by use of an automobile."

At least one other federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional. In April 1996, a judge in Charlotte, N.C., said Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce does not allow it to limit abortion protests. That ruling, however, was reversed by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"It is quite surprising that a judge would come to this conclusion," Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood Federation of America's public policy and law director, said Wednesday of Hoyt's decision.

Elizabeth Graham, associate director of the Texas Right to Life, said while her group doesn't support violence, Hoyt's ruling was proper.

"The FACE Act definitely targets pro-lifers, even the peaceful ones," she said. "It provides strict protections to one business and not to other businesses."

Bird's court-appointed attorney, Brent Newton, said a number of cases decided by the Supreme Court since 2000 have changed the climate and offer support to Hoyt's finding.